CYNICAL WEATHERS | VICTORY GARDENS THEATER INFO 773-871-3000 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Honest acting by Amandes and his fellow cast members is crucial to the success of Cynical Weathers, which could easily be undermined by histrionics: it tackles the daunting, divisive issue of the role of faith in modern American politics. Amandes plays Congressman Dixon McDaniels, a maverick moderate Republican from Corpus Christi, Texas....

friday12 never enough hope Two years ago Toby Summerfield, bassist for the instrumental rock band Crush Kill Destroy, enlisted a slew of his pals to perform and record an extended composition he wrote called Never Enough Hope. I missed the concert, but the recording is finally seeing the light of day as a self-released CD-R. It’s an ambitious work: a tidy chunk of minimalist rock with different licks, instruments, and dynamics unfolding every few minutes....

After a tabloid publishes a photo of a corporate titan (Daniel Auteuil) with his supermodel mistress (Alice Taglioni), his attorney tries to spin the situation by locating the homely parking valet (Gad Elmaleh) who happened into the frame and paying him to pose as the model’s lover. Writer-director Francis Veber (The Dinner Game) has been compared to everyone from Moliere to Blake Edwards, but this sublime French farce reminded me most of Billy Wilder (whose last feature, Buddy Buddy, was adapted from a Veber play)....

Malian kora master Toumani Diabate has made plenty of records showcasing traditional Mande music at its purest, but he’s also known for his boundary-pushing collaborations. Over the years he’s worked with flamenco musicians (Ketama), bluesmen (Taj Mahal), jazzmen (Roswell Rudd), and rock guitarists (Ry Cooder)–and always made the results sound natural rather than crassly spliced together. His long-running Symmetric Orchestra, made up of Mande musicians from throughout western Africa, plays–frequently with guests–at the nightclub Hogon whenever Diabate’s back home in Bamako....

The 28th Chicago Latino Film Festival runs Friday, April 13, through Thursday, April 26. Tickets for most screenings are $11, $10 for members of the International Latino Cultural Center of Chicago; a festival pass, good for 12 general admissions, is $100, $80 for ILCC members. Following are selected screenings; for a full schedule see latinoculturalcenter.org. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Captains of the Sands Like Hector Babenco’s Pixote (1981) and Fernando Meirelles’s City of God (2002), this Brazilian drama considers the abbreviated childhood of feral street kids....

Love During Wartime (Sat 4/21, 8 PM, and Wed 4/25, 8:15 PM), in which a young married couple try to navigate Israel’s citizenship laws; Enemy Alien (Sun 4/22, 5:15 PM, and Wed 5/2, 8 PM), about a Palestinian activist in New York City who was arrested after 9/11; and Roadmap to Apartheid (Fri 4/27, 8 PM, and Sun 4/29, 5 PM), which parallels the segregation of Palestinians in Israel with the apartheid era in South Africa....

Michael Montenegro According to Steve Tillis’s 1992 book, Toward an Aesthetics of the Puppet, the term puppeteer was coined in Chicago around 1917, at the Little Theatre, and modeled on the word for a mule driver: muleteer. Today puppetry plays a big part in the city’s theater scene, facilitating flights of fancy by Redmoon Theater, Blair Thomas & Company, and other groups. The area’s most inventive puppets spring to life in a cluttered workshop behind the Evanston home of Michael Montenegro, a Jeff Award winner who’s designed marionettes, masks, and Rube Goldberg-esque devices for the likes of Mary Zimmerman and Glencoe’s Writers’ Theatre....

Why did the chicken cross the road? Why didn’t it, say, try its hand at showbiz, take a nap, or get an X-ray? These are some of the alternative scenarios one intrepid street artist decided to explore in a series of paintings that decorate four load-bearing columns beneath the Bloomingdale Trail bridge on North Maplewood Avenue in Humboldt Park. It’s a goofy premise, and the execution is absolutely charming; the fowl depicted have been plucked of their feathers and resemble pinkish store-bought chicken, which gives the images a cartoonish quality....

The Tribune and the Sun-Times shrink before our eyes, laying off reporters by the dozens. The Tribune files for bankruptcy. Who will watch the city if these eyes blink shut? Beers explains, “What we did was sort of unpacked what the newspaper of record has been.” It’s been the sum of many parts, among them entertainment listings, lifestyle columns, and service pieces. “And all that coexists with the serious discussions about holding power accountable, helping civil society work through its next steps....

This year’s Festival Cubano, expanding to three days in Riis Park, kicks off its music programming Friday at 4 PM with a six-hour lineup of more than 40 artists and DJs celebrating the history of house—which seems like an odd choice, even considering the importance of Latinos in the development of the genre, given that the event is ostensibly devoted to the music of Cuba. Fortunately the fest has booked some important figures, including Hot Mix 5 cofounder Kenny “Jammin’” Jason and mid-80s member Frankie “Hollywood” Rodriguez, Keith Nunnally of J....

Chicago-bred rapper Serengeti (aka David Cohn) has been on a tear lately. Last month his new trio with Anticon labelmate Son Lux and Sufjan Stevens, s / s / s, released its debut EP, a collection of schizoid pop tunes called Beak & Claw. Last week he dropped a solo EP, Kenny Dennis, his fourth release as his alter ego of the same name—a fortysomething former telephone-booth repairman who rhymes in a thick Chicago accent....

Like a lot of other refugees from print journalism, Dennis Robaugh and Bob Bong have taken their act to the Internet. What’s different is the way they talk about what they’re doing. Jim O’Shea struck a note of high moment last October when he announced the founding of the Chicago News Cooperative; CNC was “”designed to provide high quality, professionally edited news and commentary to the Chicago region on the Web, in print and over the airwaves,” said O’Shea, former managing editor of the Tribune and editor of the Los Angeles Times, who already had MacArthur Foundation money and a relationship with the New York Times to back him up....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the current music-biz climate, artists are expected to be not only brilliant musicians but also brilliant marketers, brilliant social networkers, and (at times) brilliant beggars. In a B Side feature this week (expanded from a Bleader post) Kevin Warwick takes a long look at Kickstarter, the crowdfunding service that allows (or requires, depending on your view) artists to be all those things in one space—specifically, he dissects the reasons behind the fabulous success of the campaign run by Indiana band Murder by Death....

Andy Shaw, president of the Better Government Association, was even more effusive. “The mayor has not gotten along well with Joe Ferguson,” Shaw told the Sun-Times. “Yet, he understood that it’s more important to have a strong, independent watchdog than a lapdog he can control.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I hate to rain on anyone’s parade, but I don’t see why everyone’s so happy....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Evelyne Shatkin and Linda Shifflett, former administrative workers at the University of Texas at Arlington, filed a lawsuit in December claiming religious discrimination in their firing earlier last year. They said they were only trying to remedy an office dispute when they anointed the door frame of a vacationing coworker’s cubicle with olive oil and prayed for her, but a university official concluded that “praying, shouting and/or chanting over a co-worker’s personal and professional belongings without her knowledge and consent constitutes harassment....

The Blue Apple Tree screens tomorrow at Harrison Park. Starting tomorrow the Latino Cultural Center will bring back popular movies from this year’s Chicago Latino Film Festival for a weekly series of free outdoor screenings. The first, a revival of the Venezuelan film The Blue Apple Tree, takes place at Harrison Park (1842 South Wood Street) and begins around 8 PM. Future screenings include the Colombian romantic comedy Speechless at Logan Square’s Kosciuszko Park (next Wednesday, June 26) and the Mexican romantic comedy In the Middle of Heaven at Calumet Park (July 17)....

My family’s been in Chicago for a long time, but I’m the first and only Bacon to work for the Board of Education. My dad was a hat maker—he had a store on 47th Street, right off of King Drive. After he passed, my brother ran it. Tony Bacon is a 55-year-old south-side resident who works as a custodian for the Chicago Public Schools. —Ben Joravsky Best of Chicago voting is live now....

I’ve always thought that in a more perfect world Prichard would be king. But this is their first show after a hiatus of nearly eight years, so if that’s in the cards, they’re getting an awfully slow start. The words “power trio” take on new meaning here–not because the unholy maelstrom the band whipped up onstage didn’t fit the description, but because questions of social and economic power (or more often powerlessness) were at the center of their ethos....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jessica Lea Mayfield (pictured) from Kent, Ohio, who performs tonight at the Abbey Pub, released With Blasphemy, So Heartfelt (Polymer) last month; she’s only 19. The record was produced by Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys (on whose latest, Attack & Release, Mayfield appears as a guest vocalist), and his approach is minimal–in fact, almost everything about the album is minimal....

Irony interests me. You might recall that 9-11 was supposed to blow irony out of the water. We heard this from commentators who believed irony was no more than an indulgence of the self-indulgent, a patois of flip egoists that could never survive such a ruthless eruption of reality. Yet irony survived nicely. After all, it comes down to us from World War I, a cataclysm infinitely more traumatic than 9-11 that for millions made the conventional expression of conventional sentiments impossible....